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ASU named one of the nation's most sustainable universities
Lauren KawamIssue date: 10/29/09 Section: News
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A Green Report Card, put out by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, puts ASU at number two for best overall sustainable practices out of 332 colleges in America. ASU was one of the few schools to receive a grade of A (specifically, an A-), for their green policies.
The report card, in its fourth year of scoring, is the only independent evaluation of campus and endowment sustainability policies, says Cameron Bruns, a communications fellow with the Sustainable Endowments Institute.
The Institute, founded in 2005, took the top 300 schools across the nation with the most endowments - money donated to the schools with the intention that they would go toward future investments - and evaluated them based on nine categories: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building, student involvement, transportation and then the three endowment categories.
ASU received As in all but three categories, those being endowment categories, for which it received a B, a C and 'inconclusive data' for a third score.
Bonny Bentzin, the director of university sustainable practice at ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, says these lower scores could be because some of the endowments are handled by companies outside of ASU, and sometimes they are not able to disclose the information about where the money is going.
"Sometimes, it's sort of like intellectual property," she says. "They might be using it in good places, but can't talk about it."
Schools received four surveys from the Institute, one for the campus administration, one for dining services, one for the finance office and another to student leaders on campus.
The Institute then broke up the data they receive back into the nine categories. This year, the surveys were all quantitative data, so there were a lot of yes/no questions, or questions with numerical answers. The data got plugged into a big formula, and a GPA was created for each of the nine categories, and then all nine categories were averaged together to get the overall grade, so each category is weighted equally.
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